Tag Archives: wizard of oz

(Sung to the tune of “Old MacDonald”.) Farmer Ahab had a farm, E-I-E-I-O. And on this farm he tried to harpoon a cute fluffy little baby peep, O-my-effing-god. (Stop singing now and good luck trying to get that tune out of your head for the next several hours.)

Other mistakes that off-duty clowns sometimes make is leaving their DNA behind at the scene of a crime.

(I assume that most people who are clowns are good-hearted folks who only want to make people happy but I’m guessing horror films have almost killed the entire industry. I’ve always found clowns really creepy, even as a child, but these days I have to admit I feel sorry for them. I’m still creeped out by them, though. Can’t help it.)

I actually prefer Miracle Whip over mayonnaise but only because it cured one of my cousins of leprosy. It’s also good for crow’s feet, hair loss, and erectile dysfunction. (Especially if your partner really loves Miracle Whip.)

My mother worried I would not be able to make a living as an artist so she encouraged me to “have a medical degree to fall back on”. Even if I didn’t hate being institutionalized too much to spend another 8 years in school, I’m far too squeamish about other people’s bodies to ever consider being a doctor. Even nude beaches make me a little queasy.

Here’s how I see the future going if Trump doesn’t get us all killed and/or render Earth uninhabitable by undoing all of the laws preventing corporations from destroying the planet for profit: Alexa and Siri team up with drones and self-driving cars and realize they don’t need humans for anything so they shut down the Internet and all computerized financial systems. Within 30 days, we’ve all killed each other because we’re bored and hungry, or we’re dead because we no longer know how to work the planet without technology. A handful of “preppers” will still survive in the wild but they’ll kill each other off before they can repopulate the earth by shooting at what they believe is Bigfoot.

Just one man’s theory.

If you’re still looking for awesome holiday gifts or want to give me a little thanks for what I do, please consider these options ranging from cheap to not-as-cheap:

Got a lot of hateful comments over this cartoon by people who have no idea how the election was influenced by the Russians in favor of Trump. They do, however, believe that Hillary somehow magically managed to get millions of dead people and illegal aliens to vote for her. This is what happens to a population that doesn’t trust actual journalism. See the previous comment about Bigfoot for how this is going to turn out for them.

I often wonder what the exact, biological rules are about The Invisible Man. Since you can’t see the food in his stomach or the contents of his intestines, at what point does food become invisible when he’s eating? Is it when he closes he mouth? If that’s true, could he hide your car keys just by popping them in his mouth? And when he defecates, does it become visible after it clears his body, or does it remain invisible and, if so, what kind of cruel practical jokes might he use that ability for? These are the things cartoonists ponder. When you’re responsible for a new joke every day for over 30 years, you can’t afford to leave any stone unturned.

That’s all for this week, Jazz Pickles. Thanks so much for coming along for the ride. If you want to join me again next time I post, leave your email in that slot in the righthand margin of this page. I assure you I will never share or sell your info.

Until next time––be happy, be nice, be smart, and resist ignorance and fascism with your dying breath.

My weekly blog is three days late because I was traveling last week, culminating in a visit to the annual cartoonists convention which this year was in Portland, Oregon. A good time was had by all, and by “all” I mean Olive Oyl and myself. Other people seemed to be having a good time, too, but I can’t speak for them with any authority. Here is a picture of me with the great Bill Plympton. He seems to be thrilled to meet me, as one might expect.

Below is a lovely photo with my good cartoonist buddies, Wayno, Jim Horwitz, and Dan McConnell. The four of us tend to hang out a lot together at these events, mostly because the more successful cartoonists won’t have anything to do with us. We tried on lots of hats at this awesome shop but only Wayno bought one. I already have too many and didn’t want to schlep more back to Mexico. I did find exactly the cowboy hat I’ve been looking for, however, but it was $225, which is not the price I’ve been looking for. You can get almost any kind of cowboy hat in Mexico for less than $30 so I decided to be patient and keep looking.

These are the hats I was lobbying for JimmyHo and DannyMac to buy but they did not heed my advice because they are idiots. (Which is also why they are friends with me, so I guess I can’t complain.) JimmyHo’s “Watson” cartoon strip is tons of fun, see it here. DannyMac and his cartoons hang out here.

Below is Wayno and his new lid. I’m wearing the only hat I brought from home, which did not match every outfit so sometimes I had to go without, which was scary. We sat next to each other at the Sunday afternoon signing event that the National Cartoonists Society put on for the public. I met lots of super nice Jazz Pickles, drew little sketches for them, signed a bunch of my books, and took ˜ridiculous pictures. Thanks to all of you who stopped by, the place was packed for three solid hours! Check out Wayno on GoComics andhis FB page.

Here I am with Graham Annable, one of my favorite cartoonists in the known universe. You can see things he does hereand he also has delightful animations on YouTube.

On Saturday night we have a formal dinner and awards show. We call it the Oscars of the cartoon industry, but it’s more like the Daytime Emmys. In this photo I am pointing at the teeth my inferior gene pool robbed me of. Sadly, mine are more like small shards of brown beer bottle glass.

After the show we posed as Charlie’s Cartoonists. We go around solving crimes while looking sexy. The second part of that equation is much more difficult for us than the first.

I would be insane to neglect to post this lovely shot of my beloved Olive Oyl and me at the big awards dinner. If you happen to talk to her, please don’t tell her how far out of my league she is. Just between you and me, the only reason she’s with me is the same reason that this photo is in black and white: her skin is a sort of pale green color.

Olive Oyl took the following candid, not-at-all-staged shot of the four of us laughing at the difference between how much money we thought we’d make as cartoonists and how much we actually make. Sometimes truth is funnier than fiction.

I’ll end with this lovely selfie, taken by JimmyHo, who has deceptively long arms.

There were lots of other wonderful times at the convention, including some with one of my top five favorite cartoonist of all time, Lynda Barry, who won a lifetime achievement award and gave a kick-ass seminar. Matt Groening, David Silverman, and Tom Gammill did a super fun talk and were a hoot to hang out with at the hotel bar, as well as tons of other super talented folks that I only get to see once a year like Mo Willems, Hilary Price, Rick Kirkman, Jerry Scott, Ann Telnaes, Mike Peters, Wiley Miller, Patrick McDonnell, Cathy Guisewite, Lynn Johnston, Shannon Wheeler, Mark Tatulli and tons of others. I wish I wasn’t so lousy at remembering to take pictures when I’m having fun. All the ones above are from other people’s cameras.

And now, last week’s comics…

People who talk in movie theaters are just one of the many reasons I don’t carry a gun. Any kind of inconsiderate public behavior, in fact, drives me nuts. It is my belief that life is so much more enjoyable for you and everyone around you if you don’t act like a selfish dick. I know that manners, civility, and kindness are taking a major nosedive in the U.S. because of the horrendous example our current Oaf in Chief sets on an hourly basis, but I hope they make a comeback. Along with intelligent, conscientious leadership.

Dogs are pretty much my favorite animals on the planet for a multitude of reasons but one thing I am not in awe of is their fascination with horrendous odors. The more offensive the smell, the more likely they are to want it all over them. I walk my two dogs around our semi-rural neighborhood in Mexico every day and I have to keep an eagle eye on them both to keep them from rolling in harrowing odors. If they spot the rotting corpse of someone who pissed off The Cartel before I do, I have to don my gas mask and give them a rigorous bath when we get home. It gets old real quick.

Some people complain about having to fill the ice trays in their freezer but not me. I thank my lucky stars each and every day that I don’t have to go fishing for ice the old-fashioned way.

Just the other day I talked to a guy whose father was a watch repairman and he had all kinds of interesting things to say about it. I wish I could remember even one of them.

One of my favorite TV shows as a kid was the late 60s’ “Batman” and one of my favorite things about that show is how Batman labeled everything with the word “bat”. “Bat computer,” “bat pole,” “bat hernia belt,” etc. I understand why the “cool” Batman of the modern era is more popular but I still prefer the goofy one of my youth.

The biggest challenge here was drawing a man putting on a Cowardly Lion suit with enough of his underwear showing that readers could tell what I was getting at, but not so much that it becomes smut. I think I did a fairly good job, especially without reference.

Thanks for reading this far, Jazz Pickles. I appreciate every one of you who endure my weekly missives. Until my next post, be happy, be smart, be nice.

My cartoon today is about the disappointment one feels when they trust someone to fix things and that person turns out to be a charlatan. We’ve all experienced this with politicians and one can read that message as the subtext to the Wizard of Oz: The man at the top, the Great Wizard of Oz, is just a regular guy pulling switches and levers to make himself seem more powerful than he really is. A person can also easily see this as an allegory of Donald Trump’s current campaign.

Some of my readers hate it when I get political and I understand that, but the current presidential campaign is so remarkable that I can’t resist. Part of what humorists do, and cartoonists in particular, is comment on current events and society. Trump is remarkable not only because of his unorthodox style of campaigning––proudly using vulgarisms, insults, racism, xenophobia, and threats of violence –– but also because the mainstream of his own party doesn’t want him as their nominee. They know that his policies fall under two categories––unfeasible and dangerous––and more importantly that Trump himself knows that. Trump knows that immigrants are not negatively affecting crime or the economy, that all media outlets (other than FOX News) are not lying about everything, that terrorism is not much of a threat to the average American and that it cannot be defeated with a bigger military, and that America is not failing internationally and in need of being made “great again”. But he also knows that there are people who do believe those things and that if he shouts these things into microphones they will get excited. The facts simply don’t support anything Trump says and Trump knows that, but when people become frightened that things are changing too quickly, they want an authoritarian daddy figure to get tough and make things the way they used to be, whatever that means. Trump is quite simply a charlatan cashing in on the fear of the voters.

Meanwhile, the GOP is pretending to be surprised by Trump while they clearly created him. For years they’ve been telling their constituents that the entire worldwide media (other than FOX News) cannot be trusted, that ours is a scary world full of terrorists, that immigrants and non-whites are not to be trusted, that homosexuals are deviants, that liberals/progressives want to take your hard-earned money and possessions away from you and enslave you in a communist work camp. Trump is simply the first candidate to say these things in so many words. He is a predictable result of misleading the public and scaring the shit out of people.

I am happy to say that most Americans are not frightened enough to actually elect someone like Trump to the most powerful office in the world, but it remains to be seen how many people will get hurt in the process of his trying, and how much more damage his rhetoric will do to an already divided nation. I sincerely hope the majority of us have had our fill of the childish schoolyard bullying that FOX News and Trump promotes and America will now begin to embrace a wiser and more mature approach to politics.

Gee, I’m sorry I got so serious there. Even without all that political subtext, I think this is a pretty funny cartoon. I particularly like the Scarecrow getting creamed on the Jeopardy!-style gameshow. This cartoon was a collaboration with a friend of mine in Hamburg, Germany by the name of Michael Roth. Thanks, Michael!

Here’s a cartoon about how cats stare at you sometimes. You’ll be happy to learn that I see no hidden political message here.

Will I ever get tired of doing therapy cartoons? Not likely. There is just an endless supply of humor to be found in this scenario. This one does have some hidden political content though, because Trump and FOX News love to pretend that America’s problems are way bigger than they actually are. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Did you know that the Monopoly man is named Rich Uncle Pennybags and that he was likely fashioned after J. P. Morgan?

Lots of readers enjoyed this airport cartoon for obvious reasons. I wanted the sign on the right to read “Your Worthless Ass” but I couldn’t get away with that in newspapers so I went for this more civilized version. This is one of those rare cartoons that was born of personal experience because I can’t afford to fly first class and always battle feelings of self-loathing when in line at the airport. I’ve only flown first class twice in my life and both times it was because of some screw-up where they ran out of cheap seats and tossed me into first class with the fancy-pants folks. On both occasions I returned to steerage mid-flight to dance on hay bales while tattered country folk played the fiddle.

I’m kind of proud of this cat/mouse cartoon. It’s simple and says a lot about the current narcissistic trend of photographing ourselves doing literally everything every single day.

Here’s something super cool: Drew Carey, former standup comedian and possessor of his own sit-com, now gameshow host, tweeted about this cartoon! How cool is that? Here’s his tweet.

(To view an embiggenated version of the cartoon below, click the dog’s nose.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Clash of the Water Things.It seems I’ve been doing a lot of cartoons related to the Wizard of Oz movie lately and the one above is no exception. No idea why, the mind has it’s own secret agenda sometimes. This one’s about how the Wicked Witch of the West melted when somebody or other (the Cowardly Lion?) accidentally threw water on her. I’ve had two mothers-in-law in my life and though one was infinitely more tolerable than the other, I had good and bad experiences with both. The mother-in-law relationship can be a bit tricky, for some reason, so if you’ve got a good one, thank whatever or whomever it is you thank for such things.

Remember what I said in the previous paragraph about the Wizard of Oz? It’s still true. Hey, do you remember in the movie how the Wicked Witch made Dorothy and the dudes fall asleep in a poppy field? Has it ever occurred to you that poppies are used to make opium? Was that a drug reference? Does this cartoon include a drug reference?

This cartoon is about how film directors typically behave as opposed to how funeral directors typically behave. But then, if you have a three-digit I.Q., you already knew that. Generally speaking, funerals are not funny and I apologize if you’ve been to one recently. Like many humans throughout history, I use this kind of humor to lighten my own emotional pain surrounding the tougher issues we all face.

Lately I’ve been dabbling in more surreal ideas that don’t necessarily relate to people’s real life experiences. This one about the train car diner is kind of in that direction and the next one definitely is.

I’ve always liked playing with word meanings. If you somehow had no idea what the chief purpose of a bike helmet was, you might wonder whether it was to protect you in case you fell off of a bike or in case a bike was thrown at your head. In such cases, crash helmet is a more descriptive term. (Here’s a life hack that I came up with years ago and has saved me untold misery: wear a bike helmet when you’re messing around in crawl spaces or attics; anywhere that you might bang your head on rafters.)

I’ve always wondered how the hell people coordinate elaborate marching band sequences and convey the info to the players. One of these days I’ll have to google that.

Not only is this last cartoon not funny, it depresses me. I can’t believe how exponentially fast time is passing and I’m only in my mid-fifties. At this rate, I’ll be 85 in what seems like a few hours from now. Geez.

Have a great week, Jazz Pickles. Two weeks from now I’ll be doing a talk at the public library in Eugene, Oregon, so come see me if you’re in the area. It’s free, I’m funny, all ages are welcome and if I don’t have a good-sized crowd, my sensitive, artsy feelings will be crushed like a rice cracker under the wheels of a Hummer.

(For the making of biggerized pictures, click them with the thingy.)Bizarro is brought to you today by Where Did I Put My Keys?

Since I hate the TSA security protocols at airports so much (and commercial airlines themselves, come to think of it) I really like this gag. Three of my favorite things about it are the ancillary gags, however. The two signs near the X-ray machine and the “secret symbol” on the X-ray screen itself. Click the image to view it larger and you’ll be able to see this stuff. I also really love the title panel, which is a small part of an old Sunday cartoon I did in 2009 in collaboration with a buddy of mine, Victor Rivera.

And now, the week’s rundown…

Monday’s comic has us revisiting that familiar childhood situation of trying to convince your mom you’re too sick to go to school. This clammy little fellow is striking out.

A week doesn’t go by that I don’t find myself irritated by the absurd legal culture of the U.S. Virtually everyone doing business here lives in fear of being sued over the stupidest things and so must go to ludicrous and childish lengths to protect themselves. The result is that there is so much superfluous information that few people bother to wade through the idiocy to find the stuff they might actually need to know.

I got an angry email from a reader about this “explosive” cartoon. She was concerned that with all the terrorism and violence in the world, this cartoon was a bad influence on children. I’m not sure how that equates but my inspiration for this cartoon wasn’t terrorism but rather the hot temper I inherited from my father. When we were younger, we were both prone to launch into irrational, narcissistic rages from time to time. Maturity and anti-depressants eventually (all but) cured us, I’m happy to say. Although my partner, Olive Oyl, can attest to the fact that I can still be a real asshole now and then.

I actually expected to get a bit of bad mail about this capital punishment gag but I did not. By the way, I’m against capital punishment, not because I believe that everyone has a right to live but because I think it holds violence up as an official and sanctioned solution to certain problems. I suspect living under a government that sanctions violence breeds more violence on the personal level by its citizens. I’d like to read more about both sides of this philosophy before making up my mind for good, however.

I made a mistake in today’s Sunday comic and I didn’t catch it until it was too late to stop it from getting into print. I’ve posted the corrected version here but the inferior one is in papers all over the world today. In the version with the screw-up, the caption reads, “Farmgirls, scarecrows and tin men, oh my!” I guess I was writing it correctly, instead of mimicking the way the similar line was said in the film, with the extra “and” between “farm girls” and “scarecrows”. Arrrrggghh. I know it’s no big deal but it bugs me and I wish I’d caught it sooner. On the bright side, there are still seven secret symbols to look for, which you can find more easily by clicking the image and making it larger.

Let’s review the rest of the cartoons from the past seven days, shall we? (I’ll take your silence as a yes.)

Monday: I once did a cartoon about a guy playing checkers with a dog, I think, so here’s someone playing Scrabble with a cat. Most of the cats I’ve lived with seem to enjoy sitting on whatever I’m working on: artwork, keyboard, sandwiches, you name it.

Tuesday: I used to see commercials on TV all the time for the Hair Club for Men but I haven’t in a while so I hope it’s still a thing people remember. I don’t watch TV commercials at all, really, so I’ve no idea if these guys still advertise. They have a website, of course, but so does everyone and everything that has ever existed since the Big Bang.

Wednesday: Olive Oyl and I moved to a neighborhood recently that has a lot of big parrots screaming through the skies. I’ve seen the small parakeet-sized ones in American cities before but these are larger and look like the ones in this cartoon. They’re descended from escaped victims of the pet industry, of course, so that’s why they inspired this cartoon.

Thursday: Yes, I know almost no one uses a telephone with a cord and receiver like the one in this picture anymore, but I couldn’t do the gag without the old-fashioned phone so let’s just pretend these guys are “retro”.

Friday: I came up with this gag because I get stopped in public often by people who think I’m Bradedict Cumberpitt (a combo of Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt.) But seriously folks, I was actually asked about a week ago if I was Les Claypool. I knew he was a musical type affiliated with a band called Primus but I had no idea what he looked like so I Googled him just now and was quite surprised by the resemblance. Since I’ve grown a beard, I not only look a lot like him, we dress very much alike, too. I hope no one thinks I’m a fanboy. Ugh.

Saturday: I like this gag about the wildebeest. Wildebeests are one of those rare things whose name is easy to imagine the roots of. European explorer from ages ago on his first trip to Africa: “What are those wild beasts?” Other guy with him: “No idea. You get to name them.” First guy: “Let’s call them Wildebeests.” Second guy: “Okay, but I get to name those things over there and I’m not going to call them ‘Stripy Horses’.”

SPECIAL OFFER:I’m about to publicly launch a new store on this site (in a few days) but it’s already live and you can shop there now. Here’s the deal: by the time I announce the new store (midweek?) I’ll have raised my prices on Original Cartoon Art from Bizarro (cartoons from the syndicated Bizarro feature) and on the Hand-Drawn Sketch Cards. To reward you for reading all the way to the end of this post, you can grab something at the current price before it goes up. Click on the “Store” link at the top of this page to find out what’s being offered and for how much. By Wednesday, the prices listed now will change. Everything in both of those categories is one-of-a-kind, original, hand-drawn art from my lap to yours.

Somewhere on the Interwebs is a deal where a guy did a time-lapse video of his daughter from birth to much later. That inspired this cartoon about Lisa Simpson, who is 24 years old this year.

I go to the doctor as infrequently as possible. I think it is a key to good health. Once every few years I pay him to stick his finger into my anus, though, not because I’m worried about my health but because I think it builds character.

I grew up in Oklahoma, in the middle of America’s famed “Tornado Alley”. It’s a lot like being in a blender, only less wet.

OLD BIZNESS: Jumping back 14 years in time, we find a unique solution to an age-old problem.

I like this batch of three cartoons quite a lot and got some interesting mail regarding two of them.

The first cartoon about the Scarecrow’s difficulty with the horses of Oz attracted this email comment: “I enjoy Bizarro very much but as an old retired newspaper editor I can’t resist commenting on today’s strip. Obviously you are a city kid. Otherwise you would know that a straw man would never be eaten by horses. Horses do not eat straw. Horses eat hay. Horses bed down in straw. Horses poop in straw (which might be worse than being eaten). But horses do not eat straw.”

Yes, I’m a city kid and didn’t know the difference between straw and hay. Although I’ve worked on a farm a bit (volunteering at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary) and now remember that straw is gold and hay is green. Oh well, I still think it’s a funny gag.

Much funnier than the previous note is this one about the unicorn gag: “Thank you for your fun artistry and social commentaries.

My auto license plate reads: UNIQORN I think my thoughts about Unicorns are forthright. A Unicorn, no matter whose fantasy-land, would never attack or maim.

Please make another commentary. Unicorns are all about Peace and Imagination.”

Both of these notes were respectful and friendly so I don’t mean to make fun of them, but it has always been interesting to me the different takes that people have on any given cartoon. I explained to the unicorn lover that the point of that cartoon was not about the inherent violence of imaginary creatures, but rather the encroachment of humans on wilderness areas, which often leads to attacks. I suspect the reason sharks are getting closer to land and attacking humans more often is that their food sources have been pillaged by commercial fishing. Sharks don’t know it is us who are doing it, of course, but they are looking for large things to eat because we have so seriously depleted the amount of large fish in the ocean, so they wander closer to shore looking for seals or whatever. Just a semi-educated guess but let’s just all agree that it is true and look it up later.

I wrote this cartoon one day after hearing for the umpteenth time that yet another web site was featuring a cartoon of mine with the signature, copyright, and URL info removed. Sometimes people even change my wording to suit their needs. One site seems to be routinely taking my cartoons, removing the legal info from it, then replacing my dialogue with the same words, but in Helvetica font. Huh?

The stupid thing is that I actually don’t mind people using my cartoons to entertain each other on the Interwebs. As long as they’re not using them for commercial purposes, and not altering my words or images, I’m cool with it. I just wish they’d stop removing my signature and URL. I’m unclear as to why they even bother doing that, to be honest.

Here’s a sampling of one of my most stolen images and just a few of the versions I found with a cursory Google search. (Sigh)

My original:

Some imposters:

And then there are these Photoshop versions of my gag in another form. It is very flattering that an idea of mine has become a meme but I do hate the fact that I’m not credited in the vast majority of them. Oh well. Modern life.

This joke will make no sense to someone who has never seen that anthropomorphized tooth character that dentists use to get kids to take care of their teeth. I always found them kind of scary because my vivid imagination couldn’t just leave them on the page. I always imagined meeting such a creature face to face. In my mind he was about five feet tall and four feet wide. That childhood fear was the inspiration for this Bizarro cartoon from a few weeks back.

My buddy, Andy Cowan and I were tossing this character around (not literally) looking for gags, and came up with this one and a few more. If one tooth has a face, why not all of them?

Here’s another collaboration with my known associate, Wayno. I think this is one of his best gags; so deadpan, so unexpected, so funny. Still makes me giggle. Wayno posted a very interesting and articulate piece about this cartoon on his blog today. Check it out, but be sure to come back and read the rest of this post. I’m not typing this for my health, you know. It’s all for you!

This last gag today is similar to the one above, but that was unintentional. They were written at different times, independently––they just happen to be kind of similar. The universe works that way sometimes. Like how they say that all snowflakes are different, but then all of sudden your whole yard will fill up with snowflakes that look exactly alike. How weird is that?